“Smiter of the High and Mighty”

Tag Archives: Operation Black Vote

What the fuck is going on with the Bristol Labour Party Members Group on Facebook? You may recall that back in November material from this private Labour members-only Facebook page appeared on the Operation Black Vote website plastered with the headline ‘LABOUR PARTY MUST EXPEL BRISTOL’S RACIST MEMBERS’ under the byline of the Reverend’s good friend Simon Woolley “Wanker”.

That episode had all the characteristics of a shameless attempt by the Reverend and his small gang of desperate right wing Labour supporters to TARGET Corbynites in his local party and get them expelled from the party on trumped up charges of racism. Alas, the whole POORLY EXECUTED PLOT collapsed when a large majority of the local Labour Party and the city at large piped up and effectively told Rees to stop being a prick.

However, the Reverend and his supporters still seem unhealthily obsessed with this Facebook group. Now we learn that Labour members unknown have granted the city council’s HR Department FULL ACCESS to this Facebook page so that they can try to target any members of their staff who happen to be in the Labour Party and supporting Corbyn.

The city council’s HR honchos, not being ones to pass up a golden opportunity to create a MONUMENTAL FUCK-UP, have, we’re told, even gone to the expense of procuring a private company to do their dubious spying for them and start disciplining staff for, er, being in the Labour Party!

All slightly odd, as being a member of the Labour Party is not usually a disciplinary offence. Since when have teachers, social workers and street cleaners been BANNED from being in the LABOUR PARTY? Indeed our friend with a copy of Butterworths Employment Law Handbook (25th edition) assures us such disciplinary actions have “LITTLE PROSPECT OF SUCCESS“. Not least for obstructing council staff’s Article 11 rights under the Human Rights Act to Freedom of Assembly.

But perhaps the bigger question is why is the Reverend handing large sums of PUBLIC MONEY and resources to a private sector firm to target his opponents in the Labour Party? Is this a lawful use of public money?

The Reverend meets Woolley Wanker earlier this year. But no one knows who leaked that private Facebook post to Wanker.

As the Reverend heads towards the end of the second year of his car crash term in office, he’s increasingly resorting to calling in favours from friends to silence the mounting number of his critics, not least within his own party, by making WILD ACCUSATIONS of racism.

On 17 November community radio station, BCFM’s Politics Show ran an embarrassing item regarding the Reverend’s father and his antics in St Paul’s in the 1980s. The Politics Show had originally attempted to run the item on 10 November but BCFM bosses PULLED it after the Reverend got wind of it and directly intervened with the station’s bosses.

When the item ran the following week, the calm and collected Reverend told the show the item was “RACIST MUDSLINGING from a racist mudslinging show”. Although there was no discernible racism in the item beyond the fact that the main protagonists were black.

In the same week, on the 13 November, on a PRIVATE local Labour Party Facebook group, Mal Sainsbury,a female Labour activist, to mark the anniversary, posted a historical account of suffagette Theresa Garnett assaulting Winston Churchill in 1909 with a HORSEWHIP at Temple Meads Station .

Mal then invited readers to join her on a demo OPPOSING CUTS at the Council House with the ill-advised rejoinder, “Please join us and bring your metaphorical horsewhip to lick our Mayor and Councillors into shape!”

The Reverend – not unreasonably considering he’s a black man and the role of the horsewhip in slavery – took OFFENCE at this remark and objected in the comments to the post. It was then agreed that the Reverend and the activist would resolve the issue, which had obvious hallmarks of a CLUMSY ERROR rather than RAMPANT HATE SPEECH, privately.

So far, so reasonable. However, fast forward a week and a FAKE NEWS article mysteriously appears on the national Operation Black Vote website under the byline of its boss, Simon Woolley “Wanker”, and headlined, “Labour party must expel Bristol’s racist members”. Coincidentally, Woolley Wanker was a MENTOR to the Reverend at the start of his political career and regularly writes puff pieces about the Reverend on his tedious Blairite website.

A cursory reading of Wanker’s article revealed that he’d been LEAKED some partial, selected and incomplete quotes from the Mal’s private Facebook post. Woolley therefore failed to mention the suffragette context in which her horsewhipping quote appeared.

However, despite only having been SPOONFED a couple of incomplete and conveniently incendiary lines from a private post devoid of all context, this didn’t stop batshit crazy Woolley Wanker calling on Labour Party bosses to “purge the party of its racists”, smearing an individual as well a section of Bristol’s Labour Party opposing Rees’s Tory cuts agenda in Bristol.

Woolley Wanker’s rant continued, “As a matter of urgency Labour party head office must SUSPEND its racist members in Bristol until a investigation is undertaken, and SANCTION those who have supported such appalling rhetoric.”

So not only should an activist who happens to vigorously oppose the Reverend’s shite politics be thrown out of the Labour Party over a poor choice of metaphor but any member who in any way defended her against OBV’s scurrilous FAKE NEWS accusations should also be thrown out as a racist too!

A social media storm naturally followed, stirred up by supporters of the Reverend and Woolley Wanker and with Mal at the centre being subjected to HARSH public accusations of being a racist on the basis of Wanker’s fake news. Mischievious Labour right-wingers piled in too, using the opportunity to attempt to smear Corbynites and anti-cuts activists in the local Labour Party with racism.

Even Alex “Half Baked” Raikes, queen of the local race relations scene and boss of publicly funded SARI, paid by us to deal with SERIOUS RACIST INCIDENTS, waded in to this overblown internal party row. Urging people to complain to the local Labour Party, “the more who write. The better. I’m planning some work with them due to this institutional racism and race hate speech. It’s so cancerous,” she thundered. Apparently perfectly happy to use public money and resources on any old fake news bullshit she discovers on Facebook to assist her friend, the Reverend.

We predict a lot more fake news bullshit as the 2020 mayoral election approaches. Be sure to keep an eye out for any RACIST WITCHHUNTS aimed at anti-cuts activists and Corbyn supporters in the local Labour Party as the Reverend attempts to get reselected in 2019 to run again for mayor in 2020 to deliver another four years of crappy Tory austerity.

Labour’s Marvin “LUTHER” Rees, now officially selected as their mayoral candidate, continues to inhabit his own personal alternative universe.

One of the first to congratulate Luther Rees on getting selected as Labour’s mayoral candidate was SIMON WOOLLEY at Operation Black Vote (OBV), a quango that’s dedicated to getting black people to run in elections.

Naturally Woolley is thrilled at Luther’s selection and bangs on about “a true story of tenacity, inner strength and determination to win against the odds” and claims that Luther is “ON THE THRESHOLD OF MAKING HISTORY”. As if Bristolians will elect some random equal opportunities manager as mayor just so that he can achieve his personal ambition and “make history”!

Even more bizarrely Woolley claims that Luther, after the last mayoral election in 2012, was “bitterly disappointed not least because of the attempted SMEARING OF HIS CHARACTER” and then claims Luther “NARROWLY LOST OUT to the sitting Independent Mayor George Ferguson”.

This is not making history. This is MAKING UP HISTORY. Luther, the favourite to win in 2012, was hammered out of sight after running an uninspired, safety first, lacklustre,pro-business campaign aimed firmly at appeasing the city’s business community and managed by a bunch of anonymous middle class arseholes at Labour’s regional office in Swindon.

A campaign that PISSED OFF and PISSED ON many of our city’s most influential social movements. Who are, on paper, his natural constituency. He was NEVER the victim of any smears either. He’s made this up and it may be self-defeating. Doesn’t the self-styled leadership expert not realise people want a strong character to run the city not some whining, poor-me victim?

Another emerging problem for Luther Rees, expensively trained in ‘leadership’ in the US, is that he’s basically a US DEMOCRAT and not an English social democrat let alone a democratic socialist. His last campaign was therefore built on a US-style big business and corporate agenda.

His wholesale and flat-footed support for the crap BRT TRANSPORT SYSTEM and Bristol City FC’s GREENBELT STADIUM PLAN with associated supermarkets and corporate retail sheds at the cost of established communities in South Bristol cost him dear. As did his REFUSAL to challenge austerity in any coherent form and unequivocally back our public services and public realm against cuts and privatisation.

The question now is whether Luther Rees will repeat all of these errors all over again? Already we’re seeing worrying signs. Like an INABILITY to view the city except through the prism of his own limited personal experience, much of it in the US; his SILENCE on grassroots campaigns such as saving the Bush respite centre; RUNNING AWAY from the press when they ask a tricky question; FEAR of any person or group who isn’t wealthy, a personal mate or a member of the Labour Party; an UNHEALTHY OBSESSION with ‘leadership’ and the REFUSAL to condemn right wing austerity economics outright.

What possible reason would people have to vote for Luther Rees over Ferguson when they share an agenda aimed at the comfortable middle classes and keeping business happy?

Both are so similar that we’re effectively being offered a sad little beauty contest run by crap Labour spin doctors.